Moral agents and their deserts : the character of Mu'tazilite ethics / / Sophia Vasalou

• Record Nr.: UNISA996248346003316
• Autore: Vasalou Sophia
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Princeton, : Princeton University Press, c2008
• ISBN: 1-282-15850-3; 9786612158506; 1-4008-2452-4
• Edizione: [Core Textbook]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (268 p.)
• Disciplina: 297.5
• Soggetti: Motazilites; Islamic ethics
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-246) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: The framework : the Mu'tazilites -- Reading Mu'tazilite ethics -- Ethics as theology -- Approaches to the study of Mu'tazilite ethics -- Theology as law -- Moral values between rational knowledge and revealed law -- Rights, claims, and desert : the moral economy of ḥuqūq -- The Baṣran Mu'tazilite approach to desert -- "To deserve" : groundwork -- Justifying reward and punishment : the values of deserved treatments -- Justifying punishment : the paradoxical relations of desert and goodness -- The causal efficacy of moral values : between sabab and 'illa -- The right to blame, the fact of blame : views of the person ab extra -- Moral continuity and the justification of punishment -- Time and deserving -- An eternity of punishment : the Baṣran justification of dawām al-'iqāb -- Moral identity and the resources of Baṣran Mu'tazilite ontology -- The primacy of revealed names : al-Asmā' wa'al-aḥkām -- Why not Dhimma? -- The identity of beings in Baṣran Mu'tazilite eschatology -- Resurrection and the criterion of identity -- Accidents and the formal reality of resurrected beings -- Appendix : translation from Mānkdīm Shāshdīw, "The promise and the threat," in Sharḥ al-uṣūl al-khamsa.
• Sommario/riassunto: Must good deeds be rewarded and wrongdoers punished? Would God be unjust if He failed to punish and reward? And what is it about good ; or evil actions and moral identity that might generate such necessities? These were some of the vital religious and philosophical questions that eighth- and ninth-century Mu'tazilite theologians and their sophisticated successors attempted to answer, giving rise to a distinctive ethical position and one of the most prominent and controversial intellectual trends in medieval Islam. The Mu'tazilites developed a view of ethics whose distinguishing features were its austere moral objectivism and the crucial role it assigned to reason in the knowledge of moral truths. Central to this ethical vision was the notion of moral desert, and of the good and evil consequences--reward or punishment--deserved through a person's acts. Moral Agents and Their Deserts is the first book-length study of this central theme in Mu'tazilite ethics, and an attempt to grapple with the philosophical questions it raises. At the same time, it is a bid to question the ways in which modern readers, coming to medieval Islamic thought with a philosophical interest, seek to read and converse with Mu'tazilite theology. Moral Agents and Their Deserts tracks the challenges and rewards involved in the pursuit of the right conversation at the seams between modern and medieval concerns.